Gianna Volpe

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"Ancestral Fields" is the result of a metamorphosis. It bears witness to my first truly courageous act as an artist: the act of destruction b(e)aring creation. This intense growth experience occurred as a direct result of a mentoring relationship I had with the late artist Warren Rohrer, who died of cancer in 1995.

"Ancestral Fields I"
was an attempt to capture a memory from a
childhood landscape. Though it accomplished that aim, I sensed there
was something more to be discovered in it. A full year later, I began
to destroy the painting I had worked so hard to create. I scraped and
sanded and gouged and tore until a completely new piece emerged,
replete with the history of my hands. It was a cathartic moment for me
and a significant turning point in my development as an artist. None
of this could have happened without Warren Rohrer. He not only was a
remarkably vital man, despite fighting his cancer for over a decade,
but possessed an integrity with which he lived his life and created
his work that was the purest I have ever known.